Bondi: Trump Admin Will Take ‘Same Approach’ to Antifa as Drug Cartels, Which It Repeatedly Bombed

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Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

US President Donald Trump reads a note as Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks during a roundtable discussion at the White House in Washington, DC on October 8, 2025. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

US Attorney General Pam Bondi generated alarm on Wednesday when she said the Trump administration is going to take the “same approach” to Antifa as it has to drug cartels—as the military bombs boats in the Caribbean it claims are smuggling drugs.

Antifa encompasses autonomous anti-fascist individuals and loosely affiliated groups who lack a national organizational structure or leadership. Still, as the increasingly authoritarian administration works to quash dissent on all fronts, President Donald Trump last month signed an executive order designating the Antifa movement as a domestic terrorist organization.

During a related roundtable on Wednesday—held as the administration worked to deploy the National Guard in Democrat-led cities—Bondi said that “we’re not gonna stop at just arresting the violent criminals we can see in the streets. Fighting crime is more than just getting the bad guy off the streets; it’s breaking down the organization brick by brick, just like we did with cartels.”

Glancing toward Trump, she continued: “We’re going to take the same approach, President Trump, with Antifa: Destroy the entire organization from top to bottom. We’re going to take them apart. Thanks to your bold leadership, and the designation of Antifa as a terrorist organization—which is exactly what they are—Americans will no longer tolerate their unhinged violence.”

Lawyer and radio host Dean Obeidallah warned: “Please understand that this is Trump regime explaining how they will use the government to prosecute Democrats. Page 1 of the fascist playbook is imprison political opponents so that the fascist has one-party rule.”

Others noted the violence the administration has already taken. Zeteo reporter Prem Thakker said: “My gosh. After the US bombed multiple boats in the middle of the ocean, murdering people on grounds that they were allegedly ‘carrying drugs,’ the US attorney general says, ‘Just like we did with cartels, we’re going to take the same approach…with Antifa.’”

Zeteo founder Mehdi Hasan said, “So he is going to drone strike American citizens?”

HuffPost‘s SV Dáte similarly asked, “So the US military will be summarily killing them from above now?”

Trump has recently announced four bombings of boats he claimed were running drugs, without releasing any evidence. Those US military attacks have killed at least 21 people. Critics in Congress and beyond argue the strikes are illegal under federal and international law.

On Tuesday, top Democrats from key committees in the US House of Representatives demanded further information about the bombings and reminded Trump: “Congress has the sole constitutional responsibility to declare war and to authorize the use of force. You have failed to secure such authorization for these strikes.”

Also on Tuesday, Bondi appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee, where lawmakers grilled her on a range of topics. Asked about legal justification for the boat bombings by Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), she declined to comment.

Ahead of Bondi’s Senate testimony, watchdog groups and hundreds of former employees of the US Department of Justice expressed alarm about her leadership of the DOJ.

“We’re seeing the erosion of the Justice Department’s fabric and integrity at an alarming pace,“ says a letter signed by 282 former DOJ officials. ”Our democratic system cannot survive without the primary institution that enforces the law.”

Original article by Jessica Corbett republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn't bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an obviously insane, xenophobic Fascist.

Continue ReadingBondi: Trump Admin Will Take ‘Same Approach’ to Antifa as Drug Cartels, Which It Repeatedly Bombed

Underreported Memo Is ‘Declaration of War’ Against Trump Opponents

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Original article by Olivia Rosane republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Protesters hold signs and flags and a large balloon with an image of US President Donald Trump during the nationwide “Hands Off!” protest against Trump and his adviser, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, in downtown Los Angeles on April 5, 2025. (Photo by Etienne Laurent/AFP via Getty Images)

“By targeting beliefs and protest activity, the directive positions dissent itself as a potential crime,” one news organization said.

In between his highly publicized designation of Antifa as a domestic terror organization and his indictment of former FBI Director James Comey, US President Donald Trump signed a little-reported national security memorandum that gives law enforcement new tools to target his critics.

Trump signed National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7) on Thursday. The directive, titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” focuses exclusively on “anti-fascist” or left-wing activities, and mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

“I don’t want to sound hyperbolic but the plain truth is that NSPM-7 is a declaration of war on anyone who does not support the Trump administration and its agenda,” journalist Ken Klippenstein wrote in a piece raising alarm about the directive on Saturday.

Klippenstein argued that the memorandum was worrying on several fronts. For one, its focus on preventing crimes before they are committed opens the door to rights violations.

“In other words, they’re targeting pre-crime, to reference Minority Report,” Klippenstein wrote.

For another, the memorandum casts a very wide net, targeting groups, individuals, funders, and “entities” and listing several protected beliefs as “indicia” of extremism.

These include:

  • “Anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity;
  • Support for the overthrow of the United States Government;
  • Extremism on migration, race, and gender; and
  • Hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”

What’s more, the memorandum entrusts enforcement to the FBI’s over 4,000-strong Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF), which removes the legal challenges to directing the National Guard or other military forces to quash domestic dissent.

“For the Trump White House, the beauty of using an already existing network is that it bypasses Congressional oversight and scrutiny and even obscures federal activity to governors and legislatures at the state level,” Klippenstein wrote.

The types of activities that will be targeted are also quite broad, with the document defining “organized doxing campaigns, swatting, rioting, looting, trespass, assault, destruction of property, threats of violence, and civil disorder” as “domestic terrorist acts.”

The memorandum also targets any individual or group who might fund activity the administration deems terrorism and directs the Internal Revenue Service to “take action to ensure that no tax-exempt entities are directly or indirectly financing political violence or domestic terrorism,” which could be a means of threatening the status of nonprofits.

Finally, as Drop Site News pointed out, the memo authorizes the attorney general to designate domestic groups as terrorist organizations for the first time in US history.

“By targeting beliefs and protest activity, the directive positions dissent itself as a potential crime,” Drop Site wrote.

The Trump administration’s focus on violence associated with left-wing beliefs and groups is not supported by the facts. National Institute of Justice data found that right-wing violence had led to 520 deaths since 1990 compared with 78 deaths due to left-wing violence. However, the administration removed that study from the Department of Justice website shortly after Charlie Kirk was killed, The Guardian reported earlier this month.

The administration’s efforts, while accelerated, build on processes that began during the US response to the September 11 attacks, as Klippenstein explained:

A “pre-crime” endeavor, preventing attacks before they happen, is core to the post-9/11 concept of counterterrorism itself. No longer satisfied to investigate acts of terrorism after the fact to bring terrorists to justice, the Bush administration adopted preemption. Overseas, that led to aerial assassination by drones and “special operations” kill missions. Domestically, it led to a counter-terrorism campaign whose hallmark was excessive and illegal government surveillance and the use of undercover agents and “confidential human sources” to trap (and entrap) would-be terrorists.

However, the Trump administration is expanding the War-on-Terror mandate with fewer guardrails.

“Now, with Donald Trump’s directive retooling the counter-terror apparatus to go after Americans at home, this means monitoring political activity, or speech, as an investigative method to discover ‘radicalism,‘” Klippenstein said, noting that the NSPM-7 breaks with post-Watergate national security documents by failing to mention the First Amendment rights to protest and organize.

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is already eager to make use of the document.

“We are witnessing domestic terrorist sedition against the federal government,” he wrote on social media on Friday. “The JTTF has been dispatched by the Attorney General, pursuant to NSPM-7. All necessary resources will be utilized.”

In an interview with Greg Sargent for the New Republic, Trump ally Steve Bannon confirmed that Miller and others in the administration were preparing to go after left-liberal groups and media whose criticism of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could be interpreted as “goading” on violence against the agency.

Referring to Miller’s comments that calling ICE authoritarian incited violence and terrorism, Bannon responded, “Stephen Miller is correct—more importantly he’s in charge.”

The threats of investigations put liberal and left-leaning organizations in a tough place. On the one hand, they want to prepare as best they can. On the other, they do not want to obey in advance.

“Officials at these groups tell me they must strike a balance between being clear-eyed about how bad this could get while not letting it discourage political activity,” Sargent wrote. “That latter form of surrender is exactly what Trump and Miller want. And under no circumstances should anybody willingly hand it over to them.”

Original article by Olivia Rosane republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn't bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.

Continue ReadingUnderreported Memo Is ‘Declaration of War’ Against Trump Opponents

Trump Antifa Order Seen as a Weapon to Attack Left-Wing Speech, Protests

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Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Protesters march through the streets of downtown Chicago as part of a nationwide “No Kings” demonstration on June 14, 2025. (Photo by Jim Vondruska/Getty Images)

“The order appears to be a green light to law enforcement and intelligence to spy on and investigate left-wing political speech,” said one First Amendment advocate.

The executive order issued by US President Donald Trump Monday evening claimed a legal authority that the president doesn’t have to designate the “antifa” movement as a “domestic terrorist organization,” despite the fact that no central group exists to assign the designation to—but rights advocates said Trump’s claims about antifa weren’t the point of the order.

“This isn’t an attack on antifa,” said Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Healthcare. “It’s an attack on our rights.”

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The executive order states that antifa, a portmanteau of the term “anti-fascist,” will be designated a “domestic terrorist organization.” The movement is comprised of autonomous individuals and loosely affiliated groups who oppose fascism, but has no central organizational structure or leaders. People associated with the movement mobilized in 2017 to oppose the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a nonviolent anti-racist protester, Heather Heyer, was killed by a white supremacist who rammed a car into a group of demonstrators.

In the order, the president pinned blame for a “pattern of political violence” on anti-fascist protesters and organizers and pledged that the executive branch will “utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations—especially those involving terrorist actions—conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa.”

The order was written so broadly, said journalist Prem Thakker of Zeteo, that it suggests “someone recording masked agents snatching people off the streets, or asking these agents what they’re doing, can be deemed a ‘terrorist.‘”

The president has ordered US citizens, he added, “to be anti-antifa.”

With no central organization to assign the “domestic terrorist organization” to, said rights advocates, the executive order will likely be used to crack down on a wide range of left-wing protest activity and speech.

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, was among those who noted that no US law or statute gives the president the authority “to designate anything as a ‘domestic terrorist organization.‘”

All 219 groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, are foreign entities, and the designation makes it possible for people who provide material support to those groups to be prosecuted by the federal government.

“This would appear to have no direct legal effect beyond acting as a statement of policy for the executive branch,” said Reichlin-Melnick.

Chip Gibbons, policy director at the First Amendment advocacy group Defending Rights and Dissent, said that while the order “is without statutory basis, a close read of the language mirrors existing FBI powers, such as ‘terrorist enterprise investigations’ into ‘anarchist extremists.‘”

“The order appears to be a green light to law enforcement and intelligence to spy on and investigate left-wing political speech,” said Gibbons. “Given the FBI’s current guidelines, which encourage preventative intelligence in the name of counterterrorism, the FBI will have no problem continuing its sordid history of preemptively investigating political speech under the pretext of thwarting terrorism.”

At The Conversation, Dafydd Townley, a University of Portsmouth teaching fellow, wrote that the classification of antifa “as a terrorist organization could have profound effects on the First Amendment rights of large numbers of law-abiding US citizens.”

“It would be a serious danger to American democracy if US citizens were unable to voice their protest and exercise their right to free speech because of this classification,” Townley wrote.

The designation was announced amid widespread public opposition to many of Trump’s policies, including the deployment of federal troops to US cities to crack down on unhoused populations, immigrant communities, and what the president has claimed is a wave of violent crime—despite statistics showing crime is on the decline in all the cities he’s targeted.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have already responded violently to people protesting raids and arrests of immigrant neighbors, including last week when an ICE agent was filmed throwing US congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh to the ground at a protest in the Chicago suburbs.

“This isn’t about ‘antifa’—whatever that is,” said journalist Erin Overbey on Tuesday. “Trump’s new executive order is written so that anyone protesting against the US government, ICE, or even top politicians can potentially be deemed a terrorist.”

“It’s federal weaponization against free speech and the right to protest itself. Full stop,” she said. “And it’s un-American as hell.”

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

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Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Donald Trump urges you to be a Climate Science denier like him. He says that he makes millions and millions for destroying the planet, Burn, Baby, Burn and Flood, Baby, Flood.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.

Continue ReadingTrump Antifa Order Seen as a Weapon to Attack Left-Wing Speech, Protests

‘There Is No Antifa Organization,’ But Trump Still Wants to Designate It a ‘Major Terrorist’ Group

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Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Victoria Bay of Los Angeles protests against fascism while attending a “Good Trouble Lives On” demonstration in front of City Hall on July 17, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)

“I hope he can first define what antifa is, because there is no antifa organization,” said one congressman.

After US President Donald Trump absurdly announced late Wednesday night that he planned to designate the amorphous “antifa” movement as a “major terrorist organization,” a Democratic congressman had one request.

“I hope he can first define what antifa is, because there is no antifa organization,” said Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY) on CNN.

Goldman added that Trump is using the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last week “as a pretext to go after people he disagrees with.”

“He on the very night of Kirk’s murder, you will remember, accused the left of committing the murder when the murderer had not even been caught or identified,” he said.

“Antifa” is a portmanteau meaning “anti-fascist,” and the term encompasses autonomous individuals and loosely-affiliated groups of people who say they oppose fascism—but with no organizational structure or leaders, it was not clear on Wednesday how the White House would seek to designate the idea of anti-fascist protest “a major terrorist organization.”

As The Guardian noted, since antifa is a US-based movement, it cannot be included on the State Department’s list of foreign terror organizations as ISIS and al-Qaeda are, allowing the Department of Justice to prosecute those who give material support to those organizations.

“There is no domestic equivalent to that list in part because of broad First Amendment protections enjoyed by organizations operating within the United States,” the outlet added.

Trump’s former FBI director, Christopher Wray, also testified in 2020—during nationwide racial justice protests that Trump also linked to antifa—that there is no organization to designate as a terrorist group.

Mark Bray, a historian and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, suggested Trump’s threat was akin to a statement claiming that the White House could designate other social justice movements as terrorist groups.

“Antifa is a kind of politics, not a specific group,” Bray told Al Jazeera. “In the same way that there are feminist groups but feminism is not, itself, a group. Any group that calls itself antifa and promotes the basic principles of militant anti-fascism is an antifa group. There is no general headquarters or leader to get official recognition from.”

The number of members of the anti-fascist movement and their identities are not public, and though Trump called for the “funders” of antifa to be investigated, Al Jazeera noted that there is “no way of identifying and collating a list of financiers of the movement”—which mainly raises small amounts of money “for bail,” according to Bray.

“He is trying to promote the common right-wing conspiracy theory that there are shadowy financiers like George Soros playing puppet master behind everything the left does,” Bray told Al Jazeera.

With its stated plan to designate antifa a terrorist group, said left-wing commentator Hasan Piker, “they’re openly admitting they’re fascist.”

Veteran union organizer Charles Idelson added that “surely what Trump and his puppets repeating the lie really want is to ban is anti-fascist thought and speech, and imprison individuals who express it.”

Since Kirk’s killing last week, Trump and others on the right have asserted that left-wing groups and commentators were responsible for the assassination because some had tied Kirk to fascism and racism.

Trump’s claim that he will designate antifa as a terrorist group came soon after ABC, under explicit pressure from the Federal Communications Commission, announced it was taking “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air indefinitely after he remarked on the far-right MAGA movement’s reaction to the killing—a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment, said rights advocates.

Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, told The Washington Post that Trump’s plan for antifa’s designation would “raise significant First Amendment, due process, and equal protection concerns.”

Original article by Julia Conley republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn't bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.

Continue Reading‘There Is No Antifa Organization,’ But Trump Still Wants to Designate It a ‘Major Terrorist’ Group